A nation and its wars

From today’s editorials: More troops leave Iraq and more die in Afghanistan. The quest for the peace that can bring home all U.S. forces goes on.

The wars never very far from American minds hit home last week. There was the mourning that the vicious finality of combat brings. There were the questions that need to be asked about the consequences of armed struggle. And, just maybe, there was a sliver of hope.

Wednesday had the last of what are designated as combat troops leaving Iraq. It was time, once more, to ask just what more than seven years of war had really accomplished. What gains are there to reap for the cost the United States has paid, of 4,415 lives?

Yes, Saddam Hussein is long gone. A man evil enough for his own chapter in the history books was captured in late 2003, just nine months into a war so long that even its most ardent defenders might have thought twice before fighting it.

Yet the withdrawal of the last fighting forces leaves 50,000 others in the harm’s way that their noncombat role still presents. They, too, will be home, in time, though perhaps with their own casualty toll.

And then?

It will be up to the Iraqi people themselves, living amid the political unrest that comes with establishing a new nation in a land that’s known by tyranny most of all, to determine the consequences of this war. Their success will be instructive, some might say ennobling, for the country that once cast itself as Iraq’s liberator.

“It’s something I’m going to be proud of for the rest of my life.” said Army Staff Sgt. Luke Dill, 25, of Olympia, Wash., of the wartime service that had him among the invading forces of 2003 and now part of the equally important mission of leaving Iraq.

He’s the antidote to what Sen. Robert Kennedy so passionately asked about the young lives ended by war:

“Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer?” he said about the casualties of the Vietnam war. “Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read?”

America can bask in all that Sgt. Dill can do, and will do, in all the years ahead of him.

The mere thought of a complete exit from Iraq still leaves the United States in a war every bit as difficult and controversial.

Of Afghanistan, it might be asked if seven years of war in Iraq made such a daunting ordeal even more so. There’s no end in sight to the casualties there. Among them is Army Staff Sgt. Derek Farley of Nassau. He was killed Tuesday, just two weeks before he was supposed to come home, as he was taking apart a roadside bomb.

For that especially dangerous work, Staff Sgt. Farley already had made an enormous sacrifice. He lost hearing in one ear, and won a Purple Heart, doing it in Iraq.

“The world is a much worse place now that he is not here,” said his cousin, Sharon Farley Schiera of Malta, expressing sentiments that could be said about so many U.S servicemen and servicewomen, including the six from the Capital Region killed in Afghanistan.

The winding down of the war that wounded Staff Sgt. Farley leaves us longing for the same juncture in the war that cost him his life.